A speculative novel set in 2046 that asks us to question our role in the destruction of our environment, the impact of automation on society, and heightened inequity across class, race, and gender.
Use Me at Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timelineby Anuradha Vikram takes place in 2046, a near future where both automation and climate collapse are more advanced. In five provocative sections, Use Me at Your Own Risk confronts the ethical challenges inherent in our unprecedented shift to automation. Vikram sets the stage for these imagined futures in vivid detail, describing environments, complex characters, and events in disparate locations from New Delhi to Los Angeles. Described by Vikram as an activist art project, this speculative novel asks us to question our role in the destruction of our environment, the impact of automation on society, and heightened inequity across class, race, and gender.
Use Me at Your Own Risk is published as part of X Artists' Books' X Topics (XT) series, a collection of single-author books focused on the writing and ideas of marginalized voices.
Anuradha Vikram is a writer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles, CA. Vikram's book Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017), a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces, helped initiate a global movement to decolonize arts institutions and monuments. Vikram has written for art periodicals and publications from Paper Monument, Heyday Press, Routledge, and Oxford University Press.
